Tomorrow Comes a Day Too Soon

This week I’m going to dive head first into a problem that often happens at any weekly newspaper: The news doesn’t stop just because we have a production night, and news doesn’t just happen early in the week.

One of the most important aspects of developing news stories is timeliness. A story that breaks on Monday may no longer be interesting or worthwhile as front page news by the time we get to Thursday.

But with our weekly publication cycle, the flip side of the coin can hit us to. This happened for two stories this week, both of which ran on the front page and both of which didn’t occur until Tuesday.

Now, we can’t stop the news from happening. But our normal timeline is to try our best to work ahead of the game. Ideally we assign stories to each section by our staff meeting on Friday, with then each section setting individual deadlines for their writers. This gives the writes time to writer and the editors time to edit, and everybody is happy.

News happens every day though, and many times it will happen later in the week and still deserve coverage. And to quote a great journalist, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

However, that does throw off our regular reporting cycle. For “Presidents approve Duffy’s Plan” story that broke on Tuesday this week we took a divide and conquer approach. While one person was working on a skeleton draft of the story, another was phoning people, rapidly sending off e-mails and working to get enough information so the article could be complete.

The second breaking story happened in the untimely death of ex-UR professor William Fals-Stewart. My best wishes go out to the Fels-Stewart family. Covering death is always a topic for journalist debate, and not the easiest of events to cover, even with a great amount of time. At the paper here we weren’t made aware of the incident until Wednesday evening, and as I tried to get a hold of police officers and contacts at SUNY University of Buffalo, I hoped that we would be able to get enough information to give the article the weight it deserved.

I feel that in both instances we were able to give both stories the appropriate attention that they each deserved (or you probably wouldn’t have seen either article this week), and I have to say that there is an enjoyable journalist rush that comes with working on news breaking and developing stories.

And as much as I wished that UR would learn to make press announcements on the CT’s schedule, we are a ‘news’paper, and must cover the news as it happens. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Enjoy this week’s edition of the paper. Until next week. Rock it, Rochester.

You must log in using a University of Rochester NetID or Campus Times Username to comment. If you don’t have an account, you can create one below. Don't worry, we only need your email address, and we don't publish your information.